


It's a Sweet Thing

by stoicpassion



Category: David Bowie (Musician)
Genre: Canidate, Diamond Dogs, F/M, Halloween Jack - Freeform, Post-Apocalyptic, Sweet Thing, Sweet Thing Reprise, song-fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-12
Updated: 2015-03-12
Packaged: 2018-03-17 13:40:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,676
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3531365
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/stoicpassion/pseuds/stoicpassion
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Song-Fic based on the three songs from the 'Diamond Dogs' album, Sweet Thing, Canidate, and Sweet Thing Reprise</p>
            </blockquote>





	It's a Sweet Thing

** Sweet Thing/Candidate/Sweet Thing Reprise **

 

 

  
_It's safe in the city -  to love in a doorway_   
_Wrangle some screams from the dawn_

The charcoal hues of the atmosphere clawed at the long-forgotten edges of the hidden sun, allowing a haze of bloodred light seep into the sky. Dust hung thick in the crumbling city, especially near to the ground. If one could manage to reach the tops of any of the long-abandoned and structurally un-sound buildings, they could stretch their faces out into the open, gray space that was the heavens and breathe the wind that swept the ashes out of the lungs.

Jack had spent twenty years adapting to this environment. He’d been born in a shelter and brought out with the rest of them, when food supplies had run out, and, after his parents had died within the first week in the New World, learned to live in Hunger City.

His flat, on the highest floor of the building called ‘Chase’ in faded blue letters, consisted of numerous blankets piled in a corner, and a slim end table that held a white vase with a dried rose. Just a month previously he had helped Jezebel scale the broken stairs and crumbled walls to reach his ‘home’, where they had promised themselves to one another as Life-Mates.

At first she hadn’t liked the journey up and down so much, and stayed in the flat, terrified, until Jack returned. And although she soon learned to get around without his help, she never did become so agile as her Mate. He, who grabbed hold of an elevator cable and let it take him all those ten stories down. Together every morning, if Jack was home, they would ascend to the ceiling and inhale deep draughts of the new day.

_And isn't it me; putting pain in a stranger?  
_ _Like a portrait in flesh, trails on a leash --  
_ _Will you see; that I'm scared, and I'm lonely?_

Jack knew how to survive in this world; and it wasn’t until he had Jezebel that he realized that they needed to get out of the hell they had been born into. Smoke rose from the streets to the already saturated sky and spread out like a smothering pillow over the mouths of the screaming inhabitants. The smoke concealed the misdeeds of the surviving race of humans; the smoke concealed Jack pressing a smooth blade to the neck of a man in the alleyway, demanding the pills he carried.

Rumor spread along with the diseases, that fresh air had a home somewhere outside of Hunger City. Somewhere where people could stop taking pills and climbing houses to reach for oxygen. They said if you went up very high and looked at a certain place far away in the sky, you could see a place where the sun could show through. Jack was going to take Jezebel there, he promised, late at night when she soaked the pillow with sweat and tears and reached for the pill-bottle on the floor, he was going to get them out of there.

_So I'll break up my room, and yawn, and I'll_  
_Run to the center of things_

And he’d leave, sometimes in the afternoons but mostly at dusk, he’d kiss her goodbye and stroke her hair and tell her to get some sleep, even though they both knew she would wait up until he came back, for sleeping alone was a terrifying act. And he would go slide down the crumbling banisters and the fraying elevator cable to the local haunts where other humans gathered to exchange words, food, water, and pills. The food, water, and pills to keep their life systems working, the words as a matter of habit.

_Where the knowing one says:_  
_Boys, boys, its a sweet thing --_  
Boys, boys, its a sweet thing, sweet thing

Where the big man in charge was Prince Angelo, an unusual combination of muscle and wit. He sat in a decaying chair of leather and plastic and traded drugs to those attempting to stay alive and those succuming to addiction alike. The Prince played no favorites.

_If you want it, boys, get it here, thing --_   
_Cause Hope, boys, is a cheap thing, cheap thing_

He smiled a yellow smile when Jack brought in supplies. Jack, ‘Halloween Jack’, who could slip his knife of a body into forgotten crevices from the Old World and come back out again bringing valuable commodities such as obsolete technologies, canned foods, or, most desirable of all, medicines. Pills. There were doctors emerging, now, saying they knew which pills Humans should take to survive, and which were actually killing them through a long process of enslavement. Most disregarded them, but Jezebel seemed to set store by their words, which only made it worse when she gulped down whatever she could get her hands on out of desperation.  

In the thrown together lumber that acted at walls and a ceiling, which the Humans called a bar, they met and traded and fought, and nobody stepped in to stop them, which was why they learned to fight or they learned to die.

The Prince nodded to Jack and Jack made his way through the men and handed him a plastic bag like the Previous Humans had said would never recycle.

_I'm glad that you're older than me --_  
_Makes me feel important, and free_  
_Does that make you smile, isn't that; me?_

In return he got tossed a different bag that rattled and clinked. Each man thought they had the better end of the trade, but the truth of it was that neither did.

_I'm in your way, and I'll steal every moment_  
_If this trade is a curse, then I'll bless you_  
_And turn to crossroads and hamburgers_

“Halloween Jack, what’d you get us tonight?” a man with multicolored eyes asked.

“Have one on me, Sam,” Jack responded with his animalistic grin, tossing a bottle of slightly cloudy water over. Old Sam used it to gulp down two white aspirin, nodding his thankfulness. The Prince tossed Jack’s newest merchandise into a metal safe that didn’t really lock but looked nice and intimidating. The real power came from the two loaded pistols Prince Angelo kept in his jacket at all times. As he walked around selling the pills.

_Boys, boys, its a sweet thing_  
_Boys, boys; its a sweet thing, sweet thing --_  
_If you want it, boys, get it here, thing_  
_'Cause Hope, boys, is a cheap thing, cheap thing_

But this night the Prince turned to Jack and led him outside into a small area that differed from the bar only in that its gray ceiling was the sky. And he whispered into Jack’s ear news of transportation - a sale that would go fast if he didn’t pick up on it.

“I hate to see you go, Jackie,” he whispered, “But for the right price I’ll set you and the girl up with a machine that’s faster than running. I don’t believe there’s anything out there, but I’m not the one paying higher than the rooftops for it.”

And all Jack said was, “Name your price.”

_I'll make you a deal, like any other candidate_  
_We'll pretend we're walking home 'cause your future's at stake_  
_My set is amazing, it even smells like a street_  
_There's a bar at the end where I can meet you and your friend_

So Jack didn’t go home, he went down another alley. The hungry screams of children mopped up the sound of footsteps on the rubble and nobody heard the razor man crawl under their walls and slam the back of their heads against the bricks as he put into a bag everything they owned. They slept through him going away to three streets down and putting other men to sleep on the ground. They missed watching the agile figure cutting through the ash, bringing bottles to his stash.

_Someone scrawled on the wall "I smell the blood of les tricoteuses"_  
_Who wrote up scandals in other bars_  
_I'm having so much fun with the poisonous people_  
_Spreading rumors and lies and stories they made up_

They missed his boot-clad feet jumping up stairways to the high places, committing acts he’d never thought he’d need to. Shutting children’s mouths with ropes and taking from their cupboards all their hopes, and only pausing to place a kiss upon their foreheads in repentance for their lives.

_Some make you sing and some make you scream_  
_One makes you wish that you'd never been seen_  
_But there's a shop on the corner that's selling papier mache_  
_Making bullet-proof faces; Charlie Manson, Cassius Clay_

In the years after that, when other children went to bed, they’d tell each other stories of the man with the red hair upon his head, the whiteness of his face and the eye patch he wore with grace, and how if they weren’t careful he’d put a pillow to their face-

_If you want it, boys, get it here, thing_

And when the gray and red hues of dawn pushed away the black and pink hues of night, Jack hadn’t returned to his flat on top of the Chase building, so Jezebel went to the roof by herself to look at that spot where people said the sun would show through, and tried to breathe in the air, but ash caught in her throat and she sat down and coughed and coughed and crawled down the stairs to grasp at the cup of water and an empty pill bottle.

She swept down what was left of the liquid and put on her best scarf to go downstairs, down into the jungle that was Hunger City to search out Jack, or at worst some of his friends and their old acquaintances, the ones that had introduced them when she was a shivering young thing trying to get food after her father died. Back when she had snuck into the bar asking the kindest-looking boys for food, but those were the boys that pushed her down and tried to take her purse, and it was really the scariest looking men that were willing to deal with her. Like the tall fat one who pushed those boys away and introduced her to the lean leather-clad fellow with an eye-patch who took care of her like one of his own.

Jezebel walked along a path that once had been a alley to the bar, clutching in her hand two bottles of water and a can of peas, using the other hand to hold into her throat the racking sounds of coughing, the blood that came out with the air, everything coming out but the ash.

But it wasn’t silent enough to disguise it from the two emancipated bodies who reached for her with pale white fingers and dull blades, caring not how much blood came out of her as they stole her supplies and ran back to their holes. The sight on the cobblestones was of a sickly-thin woman with bright red fluid pouring from her stomach, nothing of consequence to anyone.

_So you scream out of line:_   
_"I want you! I need you! Anyone out there? Any time?"_   
_Tres butch little number whines "Hey dirty, I want you_   
_When it's good, it's really good, and when it's bad I go to pieces"_

And Jack had finally found what he was after, a yellow bottle that contained the sorts of pills other men might murder for. He would have, had it been necessary. He had that to pay the Prince with, and enough other pills to pull together enough water for a journey, for trading water for drugs was as easy as falling off of a building.

_If you want it, boys, get it here, thing_

But he didn’t know that his Mate was lying on the cold street, trying to push her life in with one fist, while it pooled around the edges and watered the ashy brick.

_Well, on the street where you live I could not hold up my head_  
_For I put all I have in another bed_  
_On another floor, in the back of a car_  
_In the cellar of a church with the door ajar_

And he would have taken a different turn, a different alleyway to reach the bar where the Prince sat waiting for the payment for their ticket out of there, but for a single cry of a dying woman which somehow made it past her trembling lips to bounce back and forth between the walls, begging;

_Well, I guess we must be looking for a different kind_  
_But we can't stop trying 'til we break up our minds_

And Jack came down the alley expecting a frightened child, the sort who might make such a scream, but he never would have guessed he would be kneeling over the body of his Jezebel who could barely focus on his pale blue eye, and he pressed his hands to the hole in her side.

_'Til the sun drips blood on the seedy young knights_  
_Who press you on the ground while shaking in fright_

And he lifted her up, for she weighed less than a blossom, and ran in confused patterns, crying out for a doctor, for one of those men who proclaimed wisdom in the days of fools, for any one human who had the tools.

_I guess we could cruise down one more time_  
_With you by my side, it should be fine_

Had it been too late? Had he reached the doctor in time? The woman breathed, pathetic gasps that were in no shape to cling to life for very much longer. She had a chance, one chance;

And the doctor demanded a Payment.

Oh Halloween Jack, such a level-headed bloke. He laughed, looking at the yellow bottle in his hand, bringing to his lips to kiss the item that had meant a route to escape the city he had been born into, the city he’d never saw a way out of before her.

So how could there be a way out of there without her?

_We'll buy some drugs and watch a band  
_ _Then jump in the river holding hands_

So he gave the Doctor what he asked.

_If you want it, boys, get it here, thing_

And waited until she was well enough to carry.

And took her back up to their flat, where he lay her down and placed a bottle of water and a bottle of pills next to her bed, trying to pretend that everything was as it should be.

_'Cause hope, boys, is a cheap thing, cheap thing_

It took six months before Jezebel was back on her feet. Six months of Jack feeding her and cleaning her as best he could, searching now only for her favorite foods, trying, oh trying so desperately, to keep her mind off the pills. He’d take her face in his hands and tell her to focus on him, and sometimes that worked, and when it didn’t, he’d bring her to the roof and they’d look at that spot so far off, where now they were sure they saw a place where the sun might break through.

_Is it nice in your snow storm, freezing your brain?_   
_Do you think that your face looks the same?_

But maybe it wasn’t so bad here, at least for now, Jack reasoned, as they tried not to look down at the boys killing one another in the street below, after all, they did pretty well in their flat. For he knew what she couldn’t, that unless a miracle happened she would never make it to the place where the sun broke through the clouds. And, if he was being perfectly honest with himself, he knew there could be no such place. And if there was, well;

 

Why would it be any different?

  
_Then let it be, it's all I ever wanted_   
_It's a street with a deal, and a taste_

_It's got claws;_

  
_It's got me;_

  
_It's got_

  
_You..._

 


End file.
